Secrets Better-Kept Unseen
by Kenzie Perth
Summary: Lavi's hiding a lot of things under his eyepatch. (Truth keeps laughing.)


**A/N: I have no excuse. I could be working on my** **long-term fics but nooo, I had to write this oneshot. Shameless shipping and crossover stuff. (This has been a kinda cracky headcanon of mine for a whole.)**

* * *

There is a red stone sitting on the table in the lab.

It's not exactly a stone, really - vibrations travel through in a way akin to jello - but it certainly looks like one.

The stone vibrates again, ripples passing through it as the door to the lab slams open. It reveals two woman, arguing fiercely.

The first through the door is older, with a set face and eyes that are emotionless. The second, younger, trails behind. As the door falls shut unheeded behind her, she protests, "This is just unethical, Dante! Why would you even test this?" If her hands were free, she would have waved them wildly, but as it was, they were full.

Full of unconscious young boy.

The older, Dante, whips around. "If some petty ideal or moral is going to get in the way of your participation in this experiment, then there isn't a point in you being here, is there?" A flash of emotion sparks in her face, and she snaps out, "Just know if you leave, then you do not deserve to be called my sister." With that, her face clouds over again and she snaps on her heel to marches over to a tray of shiny metal equipment.

The other woman, cowed, puts the boy down face-up on the table closest to the wall - the one that has restraints on it. She does adjust his head so that it rests more comfortably, but doesn't protest further.

Inside, she is hating herself for being a coward.

Dante picks up a scalpel from the tray, admiring its edge in the light. The she clicks across the room, leans over the boy and runs the edge over his cheek.

The color is almost as brilliant as his hair.

She brings over the Stone, holding it in an eye dropper, marveling at its brilliance - and then she leans over and drops it on the slice in his cheek.

His eyes snap open, and he starts screaming - he doesn't even realize he's the one vocalizing because the pain is in his mind and it's erasing him - his mother, a pretty green-eyed Aerugan immigrant and a bastard drunkard father with red hair - one dead, one as good as - no name except for a whispered one at the edge of his conscious, no age, just a love of knowledge and a despair for humanity and a tiny gang of street rat friends - and a laughing girl named Martha, /Martha/ - and it's all disappearing around the edges, disintegrating, deconstructing.

Dante surveys the scene with grim satisfaction but her sister looks on with horror. The older kneels down to press her hands to the array, and when the younger falters, clicks her tongue with displeasure.

Once both hands are on the circle, it begins to spark, blue against the red of the stone.

Underneath her breath, the younger begins murmuring prayers.

The eye takes a second to open, but when it does, it expands with terrifying speed.

And then everything is black, and then white, and then nothing.

* * *

The Truth stares at the boy, and the boy stares back with terrible green eyes that are empty and huge.

One is horribly scarred - as he stands there, it crackles with red lightning, squirming and reshaping over and over.

And then Truth grins, and the door behind the boy swings slowly open, and the hands deconstruct him faster than the red lightning can build him back up and he is traveling through the portal and seeing so much, so much knowledge and the world and _everything_ and the boy shuts his eyes because it isn't telling him anything he already doesn't know.

And his deconstructed atoms stream towards the light and to new life.

* * *

Dante stands proud before Truth, arrogance showing shamefully but to elated to care. Her mask has cracked a little in the exhilaration and the person behind it is _terrifying_ but mostly disgusting and pathetic and greedy and prideful and it wants to know EVERYTHING and it would do anything to get what it wants, even if it meant sacrificing the world or even its own humanity, which in reality is so far gone it would hardly be worth the effort.

The Truth opens its mouth. "Why did you open the portal, Mrs. Al-chem-ist?"

"To stop the stone from completely assimilating with the boy," says Dante, "and to keep him able to regenerate but still age." She pauses. "It was a trial-run. To see if it could be done."

"And why would you want to do that, Mrs. Al-chem-ist?" There is mocking in Truth's voice now but she ignores that and turns up her nose.

"So that I could live forever." She starts to laugh, forgetting herself. "An undying body! I could grow old and then make myself young again and start over! The possibilities are ENDLESS!" The laughing fit racks her body, her eyes wide, pupils blown and glassy, her frame shaking.

The Truth's grin was so wide that it split its face in half as it speaks its next sentence. "Surely you realize there's a toll?"

Dante shrugs, pushing the hair back from her face and straightening her dress. "Take a few souls from the boy's Stone. It should be enough."

Truth's grin disappears. "I'm sorry, Mrs. Al-chem-ist, but that cannot be the toll." It smiles again, standing up as it delivers its proverbial gavel blow. "I'm afraid that I'll have to be taking something rather precious from you." As it walks forward, Dante's eyes grow wide with horror - and her hands begin to deconstruct. At the same time, they begin reconstructing on the end of Truth's limbs.

"No, no no no no!" Dante is frantic in error, backing away in stumbling, frenetic steps from the advancing deity. She doesn't look back until her back bumps flat into the tall ornate gate that had never registered _until now because it was blocking her escape and she had to survive this couldn't be happening (no-)_

Her eyes grow wider, if possible, and she screams as the doors creak slowly open and the eye slides into existence and the hands surrounding it grip her limbs and pull her backwards and she begins to disappear into tiny flecks of elements starting with her feet and the stumps of her wrists and she doesn't stop until the door slams shut and even then, she pounds on the door and shouts desperate denials.

And she doesn't even realize what else Truth has taken from her - she won't until she looks in the mirror and discovers her face to be a mass of purple and red and scar tissue and her hair white and blotchy.

It takes her pride.

Not for the first time, Truth takes some satisfaction in a job well done.

* * *

Dante's younger sister takes one look at the surroundings, Truth, and then collapses onto her knees.

Her name is Amelia, and she has brown hair like her sister, though not as streaked with white. Appearance-wise, she gives the impression of someone who was once pretty but grew out of it. Her jaw is weak compared to her sister's. So is her will.

She clutches her hair in her hands, pulling it out of the slightly frazzled ponytail, and asks without looking up, "Are you Truth?"

The being decides to go with the typical answer. "I am everything. I am the world. I am everybody. And I am you."

She doesn't look away from the ground. "So you are Truth." Her breath hitches, her pulse hammering, and she says, "Take the toll." Her voice is flat and low with despair, not screaming, not angry, just resigned.

It is the voice of someone used to being trampled on - the voice of someone who knows better than to fight back.

The smile on Truth's face disappears. Nevertheless, the gate opens and the hands reach out to take her.

Just before the doors close, Amelia looks up and the last deconstructed ash remnants of her eyes disappear into the air, leaving her with empty sockets. It is a haunting image.

She flies through the spiral of knowledge without seeing a thing - the second to do so, though not of her own volition.

Truth doesn't smile. Sometimes, the toll is harsh.

* * *

Black-circled eyes blink into his vision, expanding into a wrinkled, disapproving face and then a odd-looking man with a ponytail bound up to the top of his skull.

Idly, the boy notices that the rest of the man's head is entirely bare. Also, the man is probably no taller than the boy himself, if he were standing.

Speaking of which, what is his name?

He doesn't remember. Actually, he remembers nothing at all.

That isn't true - he remembers lots of things, meaningless facts that aren't important right now. But anything about the boy himself is an empty void.

In short, he is no one.

Bookman has found the perfect apprentice.

* * *

The eye is covered with an eyepatch so the other Bookmen and civilians don't ask questions. The boy's head is filled with training - knowledge, procedures, and emotional detachment.

That last one proves to be the hardest to learn because the boy gets so _angry_ (he's always angry) at the tiniest things, like a living incarnation of wrath.

(Bookman doesn't know and will probably never know how ironic that statement is.)

But he learns, and his anger slowly dissipates into a faint noise in the background of his mind.

He is as tall as Bookman now, and his name is Quill.

It's his sixteenth identity and one of his first favorites.

* * *

(The man underground in the tunnels waits seven years for his Wrath and the woman who he gave the stone to before he tries again.)

* * *

The boy (his name is Deak Bookman Jr. now) is no longer a boy - he's about fifteen years old and he's ridiculously good.

He notices everything, even stuff trained, graduated Bookmen don't, and he is so fast when he fights that there are soldiers in countries that he's traveled to with Bookman who tell stories of a red-head teenaged boy who can dodge bullets and scout his way through minefields just by looking at the ground.

 _Nonsense_ , other people tell them. _That's impossible_. And the soldiers laugh and then toast together to the red-headed boy who survived every odd.

And then the second Holy War breaks out, and the newly-christened Lavi meets Allen Walker and everything changes so much.

It's the smile, actually, that Allen has that Lavi bases his personality on, because this persona is supposed to be happy and open and cheerful because it is so much easier to get information out of teenagers and just people in general with a smile and Lavi can "smile", but it doesn't look real or sincere, at least not in the way that Allen's does.

But eventually, the smile takes root and becomes so much more than just a shell.

Bookman Jr. _becomes_ Lavi, and it's terrifying.

It's also against the unwritten Bookman law.

So he keeps it hidden under the eyepatch along with his other secrets. And eventually, he hides their relationship under the eyepatch, as well.

All his secrets.

* * *

Allen Walker always wonders what's under his Lavi's eyepatch. One day, he asks as they're lying together in his room. The bed is cushioned and the white-haired exorcist is just so /happy/ to be alive after a particularly nasty mission involving a flesh-eating piece of Innocence and they're just snuggled together and enjoying each other's warmth and Allen asks.

He's blunt. "What does your eyepatch hide?"

Lavi finds it interesting, how he phrases the question, like he knows that it's more than just a scar or a lazy eye - that it's something worth hiding. Mostly, though, it scares him so much and his body tenses involuntarily but Allen's face is watching his so he just says "A lot of secrets." and leaves it at that.

(He knows that everyone else has their secrets, as well - he's seen the way that Kanda stares pensively at his hands when he thinks no one's looking like he's expecting blood, the way Lenalee rubs her wrists like she's searching for restraints or maybe scars - but they're allowed to have _that_ kind of secrets. Bookman Jr.'s not.)

Allen's face twists petulantly, just a little, and Lavi sighs and slowly guides his gloved hands to the strings that hold the piece of fabric to his head.

The boy removes it slowly, untying each knot with care and Lavi watches him the entire time.

It comes off and he leaves that eye closed at first but then slowly opens it.

There's a red scar around the middle of his eye but more noticeable is the twisting red dragon that's replaced his pupil.

Allen smiles down at him and leans forward to kiss his forehead and almost without noticing Lavi's eyes flutter closed and he brings the boy closer.

"What is it?" Allen's voice is quiet. "I mean, if you know."

And Lavi closes his eyes and tells him a story.

Allen takes it all surprisingly well, and next time his eye activates, heralding a fight, he takes a good look at Lavi first and sees a maelstrom of a hundred thousand red souls that spin in circles and circles.

Lavi notices and smiles at him and Allen can't help but smile back.

Because it all would be okay again, as long as they could still smile.

Truth did just that.


End file.
